If you're a young, single and adventurous female human and wondering what to do with the womb you have just lying around inside you collecting dust, an opportunity has arisen. You can bear a Neanderthal baby.

This is a once in an aeon chance to have your very own bundle of fur; a little Ug Jnr with your eyes and smile but the back hair of its great-great-great-great-great (etc) grandfather.

Prof George Church of Harvard Medical School believes that he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA, and is seeking a volunteer have the "neo-Neanderthal" embryo implanted into her uterus. Church believes that a new race of human could be beneficial if we end up facing an apocalypse at some point, so the lending of your womb could potentially save humanity. Or at the very least produce a subspecies that would be good at heavy lifting and killing the DNA-reconstructed mammoths we will inevitably recreate as well.

If you're of a scientific bent and fancy participating on an equal footing, you will be entering into a long, illustrious and completely insane history of self-experimentation. People of science have long been doing themselves a mischief with infectious diseases, surgical procedures and physics-defining experiments. Some have been more successful than others. For every Werner Forssmann, who performed cardiac catheterisation on himself and later won a Nobel prize, there is an Alexander Bogdanov, who died following a blood transfusion experiment in which he received the blood of a student with malaria and tuberculosis.

And it wasn't just unhinged Victorians or deranged Edwardians who inflicted experiments on themselves; Barry Marshall, an Australian physician, won the Nobel prize in 2005 for infecting himself with Helicobacter pylori to prove that this type of bacteria caused stomach ulcers. It did indeed give him a stomach ulcer, as well as really bad breath, which was brought to his attention by his mother. So as well as being the person to save humanity, this is going to be the only way you're going to win a Nobel prize.

Of course, you may have to leave the country to participate in this research, as this kind of experiment is illegal in Britain and many other countries. Perhaps because legislators believed the film version of The Flintstones to be as much of a travesty as I did. We simply can't let something like that happen again.

While some self-experiments were dangerous and led to illness and excruciating death, some were fantastic finds for the participants. Around 1800, chemist Humphry Davy experimented on himself with a new gas called nitrous oxide, which went on to be known as "laughing gas". He had so much fun with this discovery that he would have laughing gas parties for his friends.

It seems unlikely that there would be many women willing to go through pregnancy and childbirth only to be rewarded with a short, uncouth and uncommunicative brat, and yet so many seem to do it. If you can push the thoughts of Rosemary's Baby out of your mind and fear not the possibility of becoming Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde, then consider renting your womb to Church. If however, like me, you believe that scientists who propose this kind of science should be willing to try it on themselves, then let's just wait until Church has a go first.